Entreaties Offered in Silence Fall on Deaf Ears
by Liquid Laughter
Summary: The routine isn’t hard. By now, she’s perfected it to the point that she no longer has to even think about her actions; her tasks are accomplished without any real mental input on her part.
1. Night of Fear

_Disclaimer: I, most regrettably, do not own Harry Potter or any of the magical, fantastic things or people associated with him. _

_***_

_The silent night has turned to a night of fear  
With windows howling wind into your ear  
You listen to the spirits far behind  
These things you hear are too much for your mind_

_The bell strikes and your spine chills like the grave  
The chill that turns your blood from red to grey  
You know that with these things you see and hear  
The silent night has turned to a night of fear_

_Image on your bedroom wall  
Shadows marching in the hall  
Just about to flip your mind  
Just about to trip your mind  
Just about to flip your mind  
Just about to trip your mind_

_The green and purple lights affect your sight  
Your mother cannot comfort you tonight  
Your brain calls out for help that's never there  
The silent night has turned to a night of fear_

-_Night of Fear, E.L.O._

***

The routine isn't hard. By now, she's perfected it to the point that she no longer has to even think about her actions; her tasks are accomplished without any real mental input on her part.

Get up. Get dressed. Relieve Harry of guard duty. Try to scrounge up something for breakfast while Harry sleeps. Argue with Harry about where they should go next; where they should be looking; why one place is less or more desirable or probable or problematic than any other. Clean the tent that doesn't really need cleaning while Harry paces back and forth, right outside of the entrance, just out of her sight (as far away from each other as they're willing to get). Ignore the bitter twisting pain in her stomach that tells her she hasn't eaten anything decently prepared and truly filling in months. Relieve Harry of guard duty. Try to scrounge up something for dinner. Put on her pajamas. Crawl into bed. Turn to face the wall. Stop moving until Harry believes she's fallen asleep.

The routine is easy. The _day_ is easy, even though the monotony and the utter hopelessness of it all are beginning to grate on her in an exhaustion she never dreamed she could feel. She looks forward to the day (as much as she can look forward to anything) because it's something she can control, simply because of the redundancy. The day lets her escape from having to think, to feel.

…The night, however, is something beyond her capabilities to contend with.

It comes seeping in, twisting every good thought she's ever had into something bitter and blackened and evil. It's not something gradual that creeps into their camp in time with the shadows that tiptoe across the sky and bruise the last rays of light. It's something that surges over her, in desperate, angry, powerful waves. The closest thing she's ever experienced is that dementor attack in third year, when she and Harry faced an army of them, and the despair was tangible and the end was so close…

…But even that wasn't so bad, because somewhere beneath all the agony, she heard that logical little voice inside her head that reminded her that the dementors were supposed to create that pain; that the horror wasn't truly real, didn't have to be her reality.

She doesn't have that comforting logical voice telling her the same thing of the monsters she sees in the tent at night. In fact, she doesn't seem to have that logical voice telling her much of anything, any more. It seems that with the way her life has been going lately, she no longer has much of a reason to be logical.

No, that's not true. She has a very good reason to be logical. He's in the bed across the room, and even in sleep he looks vulnerable and scared and defiant and so god-damned young. But he's so hard to stay collected and logical for, because he's not the reason she's lived the last seven years of her life in a purely methodical manner and spouted off practicality with every word she spoke. That reason is the most illogical, unobservant, obtuse person she's ever met.

And he'd left them two months ago.

He revisits her, at night. He comes stealing into the tent with the other beasts and nightmarish horrors that haunt her between the hours of sundown and sunup. But he's never the same. He's always one of _them;_ taunting her with the same reckless abandon, the same intended maliciousness, making her quiver in fear and anguish more than any of the others. And it scares her, the brooding, sullen darkness, the over-powering silence that threatens to consume her, the half-imagined flickers of shadows at the edge of her vision, him at the forefront of her mind all the while…scares her so badly that she can't do anything but shiver so uncontrollably that her body needs _some_ kind of release and she just cries; great heaving sobs that she hopes Harry can't hear. And she can't stop, and it's so painfully frightening because that logical voice in her head can't tell her it isn't true, that the horror isn't real. Because it is.

Sometime before daybreak she'll drift off to sleep, but he's still there, mocking her in her dreams, and she always wakes feeling disconcerted and shaky. He dissolves with the first rays of morning light (or at least the first hint that it's now day), but she knows that she'll see him again that evening. But she refuses to think about that longer than she has to. So she gets up, and gets dressed. She relieves Harry of guard duty and tries to scrounge up something for breakfast while Harry sleeps. She argues with Harry about where they should go next; where they should be looking; why one place is less or more desirable or probable or problematic than any other. She cleans the tent that doesn't really need cleaning while Harry paces back and forth, right outside of the entrance, just out of her sight (as far away from each other as they're willing to get). She ignores the bitter twisting pain in her stomach that tells her she hasn't eaten anything decently prepared and truly filling in months and relieves Harry of guard duty. She tries to scrounge up something for dinner. Puts on her pajamas. Crawls into bed. Turns to face the wall. Stops moving until Harry believes she's fallen asleep.

The routine is easy. The _day_ is easy.

But the night…the night scares her to death.

***


	2. Needing You

_Disclaimer: Still not mine!_

_***_

_Needing you, wanting you, I just don't know what I'm gonna do  
To tell the truth it just ain't no use: my mind ain't strong enough  
To forget about you. _

_Oh baby, hey, here I am trying to be proud  
Trying to fool myself with this unreal smile, telling everyone  
That I no longer cling to you, but I know myself that can't be true, oh…  
How can I forget a love I've known for so long  
The heart may not remember, but the mind goes on and on  
And the more I think about it the worse off I get… _

__

Now that you're gone, how can I go on? The same love that made me smile  
Right now it makes me blue, oh, how can I get you back? I need you here so bad...

_I'm needing you, wanting you, oh I just don't know what I'm gonna do, ooh, no  
To tell the truth, it just ain't no use: my mind ain't strong enough to forget about you…  
_

___-Needing You, Natalie Cole_

***

She's become a good actress. She has to be. With six older brothers, if you don't have your game face on twenty-four/seven, you might as well consider yourself down and out for the count. Because any sign of weakness – any at all – and you'll be as doomed as a man with a bleeding flesh wound in the middle of an ocean filled to the brim with ravenous sharks and (on the off chance that he survives that encounter) an ax murderer waiting to finish him off at home.

So she's had plenty of practice staying strong for the public eye. Even if that eye is merely as public as the private intricacies of her family. _Especially_ if that's the case.

It wasn't so bad at Hogwarts. There she had something to do, something to fight for; something to make her feel like she was actually contributing, in some small way.

…But here at home, she's convinced that she's quickly going to go utterly insane. That is, if she's not there already.

It's just her and her parents now, and the silence of the house has never been more disconcerting, more nerve-wracking, or more frustrating. Within a week of arriving home, she'd cursed herself seven ways to Sunday for every time that she'd ever wished she was an only child. The quiet is all-consuming, and it's threatening to drag her under. The only constant sound is the ticking of the clock, and, Merlin be damned, she doesn't care if it is one-of-a-kind: if she has to listen to the bloody thing swing a hand to "Mortal Peril" one more time, she's going to go stark raving mad. And it won't end well for the useless contraption.

Every day it's the same thing. After waking up, she and her parents share a solemn breakfast. Then, she and her mother solemnly carry out the household chores while her dad solemnly tries to do anything and everything he can to aid the effort from his helpless position of Order-imposed exile. During a solemn afternoon tea, she tries to soothe her mother's frantic worries and puts on her brave face for her father, who's more afraid than she's ever seen him. They eat a solemn early dinner in solemn silence before dispersing to spend the rest of the evening in solemn solitude. This solitude, of course, presents a problem:

The gap between dinner and the time at which she can acceptably go to bed is far too large. It gives her far too much time to think. And the emotional baggage that comes with what she thinks of during this time gap is quickly becoming far too difficult to conceal, her excellent acting skills notwithstanding.

She remembers him.

Every room she enters, she sees him. He's been in this house so often, his memory is imprinted all over the place. And so it's not surprising that, being stuck in this house, she can't banish him from her mind. She drives herself to the brink of insanity every evening, in those few hours, thinking and remembering and wishing in that god-damn too-loud silence. And gradually, as her routine continues without a change, she begins to think during other hours of the day, during those solemn silences that not even forced conversations and the screams of boiling tea kettles can fill.

Days are hard; nights are easier. She lives for the nights.

At night, she can curl up into a little ball and pretend that the pillow at her back is a warm, firm chest that she'd often fallen asleep against as they lay together on the couch in the common room; that the blankets wrapped around her are the arms of a familiar, comforting embrace that made her melt each time she felt it. She can close her eyes and give herself up to the dreams that she can never seem to summon during the daylight. And the silence is familiar and reassuring, because nights are _supposed_ to be quiet. For a few merciful hours, she can allow herself to pretend that he's not really gone; that it was all a bad dream and he's holding her and whispering words of comfort in her ear like he did whenever she was upset. Of course, this makes it hurt twice as bad when she wakes up, but she's adept at hiding the pain.

…They'd never really clarified where they stood with each other before he left. They simply parted with the unspoken understanding that she would wait for him, that she'd still be waiting when – _if_ – he came back. And it was true. She _is_ there waiting for him. And figuratively speaking, she will always be there. He'll always be the first one she thinks of, the first one she longs for, the first foremost in her mind. There will never be anyone else for her, and she knows it.

But sweet Merlin's sweaty old gym socks, she's already waited a long time, and Mr. Noble better get his arse in gear if he expects her to stay behind until he finishes the job, because even _her_ acting skills are beginning to falter with the strain of concealing how sodding _impatient_ she is. She's pants at this whole waiting business. Always has been. And she's worried and anxious and heartsick on top of it. And she's going so stir-crazy that she wouldn't put it past herself to find a way to bust out of that somber little house with its somber little daily routine and break past its somber little wards to go track down the Selfless Chosen Prat herself.

She's always been proactive. When she and Ron played as children, she was always the one rescuing _him_ from the dragon or beastie. Not once did her brother(s) ever rescue _her_. She resents that that's changed without her permission.

…Because of the world she's been forced into, she's become a good actress. But she's never been the damsel-in-distress type. And she's getting tired of pretending that she is.

***


End file.
